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The Boy
in the Striped Pajamas
plus reviews of Madagascar 2,
Soul Men and Role Models

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The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (Three Stars)
U.K.; Mark Herman

A movie adapted from a children’s book set in the Holocaust sounds like a risky proposition - though teenager Anne Frank’s Diary remains our best-loved chronicle of that tragic, bloody period. But Mark Herman’s film of John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pajamas dodges most of the traps and wins most of its bets. The film shines a light upon a significant area of that awful darkness.

It's an engrossing, sometimes powerful work. Not too sentimental, not too horrific, it suggest the enormity of a whole cultural bloodbath by keeping us mostly at the edges, on the perimeter, observing the horrors of an Auschwitz through the eyes of an innocent: an inquisitive but “protected“ boy, Bruno (Asa Butterfield), eight-year-old son of the camp commander (David Thewlis).

Bruno is an adventurous boy who doesn’t realize the significance of much of what he sees -- the haggard, bullied prisoner named Pavel (David Heyman) who works in his father’s kitchen and says he used to be a doctor, the tall wire fence behind which he sees another sad little boy his own age named Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), the billowing black smoke which rises behind the fences, consuming unseen other innocents, other children and adults, part of the community of six million victims in the World War 2 Hitlerite orgy of bigotry and hatred.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas brings that home. In the film, we first see Bruno running free and playing with his friends in the Berlin streets, peeking at a party with his grandpa (Richard Johnson) and outspoken grandma (Sheila Hancock), then moving to the isolated camp with his parents and older sister Gretel (Amber Beattie) an impressionable girl who meets there a handsome young lieutenant named Kotter (Rupert Friend) and becomes fertile soil for the Nazi propaganda spewed by their tutor. Bruno meanwhile meets Shmuel, whom he first sees sitting near the wire fence, head shaven and down, clothes dirty, taking a rest from the day’s toil.

The boy actors are both excellent and their friendship is emotionally convincing. No one else Bruno sees is his age. And Shmuel, and the world behind the wire, begin fascinate him. We see almost everything in the film, until the furiously intercut, near D. W. Griffith-like climax, through Bruno’s eyes. And that means we’re screened in a way from the horror. Bruno’s parents (Thewlis and the equally fine Vera Farmiga) are to a degree monsters, the father accepting the butchery he supervises as necessary and patriotic, the mother concerned mostly because of its possible deleterious effect on her children. (Not the Shmuels.)

But because we see them through Bruno’s eyes, she appears nurturing and rebellious, he seems stern but good. Bruno’s friendship with Shmuel continues because he doesn’t talk about it, protecting himself. Finally comes the ending -- stark, shattering, at least partly inevitable.

The film’s opening sections seem to me faultless, even though the German characters are largely played by Britons and Americans, speaking with “Masterpiece Theater“ accents. That’s a reflection of the filmmakers’ origins. Director Herman, who made the irresistible critical hit Brassed Off, is British and Boyne, the original author, is from Dublin. (He claims there’s no intended metaphoric hint of British-Irish division and “troubles” in his portrayal of the young friends.) There is a problem with the ending, which is, in a way, almost too horrific, even too melodramatic, for the rest of the story. I‘m sure that ending and its undeniable excitement help contribute to the film‘s high popularity overseas. But the movie might have been even more effective with something just as dark, but less extreme.

I don’t look at this lightly, or from a distance. My father’s relatives were largely German and Hungarian Jews and gypsies, so many of them probably were interred or died in the camps too. (Divorced from my mother and living in another city, he never discussed it with me.) Yet I confess I feel a fascination for Holocaust films -- for Schindler’s List, The Pianist, Eroica, Night and Fog, Fateless, Korczak, and the others -- probably because of their “There but for the grace of God” effect. How can almost any problem, however injurious, be worse than this nightmare of “No Exit” anonymous persecution? How can we reconcile the fact that Holocaust deniers still exist, that wars still rage and that anti-Semitism and dozens of other irrational, brutal bigotries still survive and thrive?

We are not innocents any more. But we are, like Bruno and Shmuel, living in the shadow of the horror. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, reveals it again, makes us face it, pulls us with terror and pity into the presence of evil.

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Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (Three Stars)
U.S.; Eric Darnell, Tom McGrath
    
Bernie Mac is remembered in two posthumous movies this week. In the better of the two, the DreamWorks cartoon Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, he has a smaller but still memorable role: the “Lion King-ish” supporting voice part of a James Earl Jones-ish furry monarch named Zuba, who is reunited with his son, showy zoo star Alex (Ben Stiller), one of the stars of from the first Madagascar. (See DVD review.)
    
It’s a good turn, in a movie that’s full of star voices and big juicy parts. But it’s in the second movie, Soul Men, that we see more of the classic Mac. There he plays a side-singer (like the Pips or the Gang) in a one-time big-time soul group called the Real Deal, now gone to seed -- and he is quite movingly memorialized under the end-credits. Soul Men (reviewed below) is Mac’s unintended movie testament and epitaph, and even if you can quibble with parts of the script, it’s a punch to the heart.
    
Madagascar 2, on the other hand is a big, beautifully executed computer feature cartoon in which he‘s part of a grand goofy ensemble -- and it’s a movie that improves on its 2005 predecessor and that also shows off again the really formidable modern animation technology that‘s been improving since the feature cartoon renaissance began with Disney‘s Little Mermaid in 1989.
   
In this sequel, after Alex and his buddies (Marty the wise-cracking zebra, voiced by Chris Rock, Melman the melancholy giraffe, voiced by David Schwimmer and Gloria the sex-bomb hippo, voiced by Jada Pinkett-Smith) fly a wrong-way makeshift plane to Africa, we see vast herds and prides and bunches of zebras and lions and other animals, each as delicately separated and complete as one of Andrew Wyeth’s painted blades of grass on a field. Madagascar 2 is a shockingly good-looking movie but it’s also a funny one. It has a wittier script than the first Madagascar, and good music again from will i. am and Hans Zimmer; it reprises i. am‘s rollicking vamp “You got to move it, movie it.” So it’s also an often deliciously entertaining shows, for kids and adults.
    
The holdover actors here include one animal-star voice guy who’s a real hoot: that comedy killer Sacha Baron Cohen as the wacked-out lemur monarch King Julien (Cedric the Entertainer, Mac‘s old Kings of Comedy cohort, plays Julien’s minion Maurice). Julien is an intoxicatingly fatuous and egotistical fool of a leader, whose bossiness and ludicrous vanity keep striking comic gold -- especially when he takes it out on the wondrously competent Madagascar penguins -- skippered by co-director-writer Tom McGrath as the head penguin.
    
These ever-ready penguins build the “Flight of the Phoenix” flying rattletrap that starts out for Central Park and winds up in Africa. (That‘s Africa the continent, not, as Sarah P. might have had it, Africa the country.)
    
There, of course, the gang meets the new characters -- Zuba and his queen (Sherri Shepherd), his villainous usurper Makunga (Alec Baldwin) and a frightening little old lady (Elisa Gabrieli). And writer-director combo Eric Darnell and McGrath (with co-writer Etan Cohen,) take their earlier comic themes and riffs and keep pumping them up higher, making them work slicker and better -- while collaborating smartly with visual wizards like their camera consultant, cinematographer Guillermo Navarro, to make the movie look as good as it possibly could. Just like Gloria the red-hot hippo babe.
   
Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa isn’t the best feature cartoon of the year, but it’s pretty damned funny. I just wish it had more songs. In fact, I wish most cartoon features these days had more songs. Remember Menken and Ashman’s “Under the Sea?“ Where did they go? (You got to movie it, move it….”)

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Soul Men (Two-and-a-Half Stars)
U.S.; Malcolm D. Lee

Soul Men, in which Bernie Mac does get a proper sendoff -- and the late Isaac Hayes does as well -- has (too bad) all kinds of script problems. But it has something most other movie comedies would sell their souls for: two big, juicy feuding-guys-on-the-road parts and two terrific costars to play them: Bernie Mac and Samuel L. Jackson, both of whom dig in and grab the audience by the funny bone.

 A good comedian can get laughs with good lines and situations. A great comedian can get them no matter what. And that‘s what Mac and Jackson do here -- as Floyd Henderson (Jackson) and Louis Hinds (Mac) of the Real Deal: two famous ‘70s backup singers, whose lead singer, Marcus Hooks (John Legend) split off for solo stardom, leaving them to bicker and break up, Now Marcus has died and the two survivors, who haven’t socialized for decades and now lead totally different lives -- Louis is a salesman and Floyd is an ex-con dropout -- are reuniting to appear and sing old hits at Marcus’ sendoff at Harlem’s hip Mecca, the Apollo Theater, the house that James Brown brought down.
    
It’s really not a bad movie idea. But why are these guys riding cross-country to get there by car, instead of taking a plane? To get to know each other again? To win a bet? Obviously, it’s because car journeys are more cinematic than plane rides. (I agree heartily.) But writers Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone don’t sell it. Nor do they really sell us, at the end, on the series of mishaps and outrageous catastrophes that bedevil the duo before and during the tribute to their old legendary front man.
    
Be that as it may, there isn’t a scene where Mac and Jackson don’t deliver the goods. They’re both experts at anger, which is what makes them such a crack team here. Mac has that simmering, half-crazy mad, half-sweet look (it looks even gentler in the real-life interviews that accompany Soul Men’s credits) that makes his blowups cut deeper. Jackson is simply a virtuoso of quiet and not-so-quiet rage. What they convey together is the agony and ecstasy of once clicking, losing it and trying to click again. And they supply al the subtext, motivations and humanity, that the script often lacks.
    
The movie is worth it just to see them. Especially Bernie Mac. Rest in peace. And thanks for the laughs.

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Role Models (Two Stars)
U.S.; David Wain
    
Here’s a pretty smart buddy-buddy movie comedy with two gifted co-stars -- Seann William Scott as another of his grinning studs and Paul Rudd as another bemused onlooker -- which is also slightly better written than Soul Men, but that I didn’t enjoy as much. Scott and Rudd play friends and co-workers Wheeler and Danny (they’re an anti-drug lecture team for Minotaur beer -- who get into a bad traffic accident and have to do some community service time. They wind up as “big brothers“ for Sturdy Wings, a youth service run by ex-addict Sweeney (Jane Lynch), where they provide some adult male guidance supposedly to troubled kids Augie (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), who only connects much to his medieval games pageant group, and the foul-mouthed ten-year-old Ronnie (Bobb’e J. Thompson).

Actually I shouldn’t have singled out Ronnie for four letter eloquence, because pretty much everyone here, except Danny‘s fed-up ex Beth (Elizabeth Banks), either swears like a sailor, or makes you feel like swearing. We’re in Farrelly-Apatow country here, but somehow it didn’t make me laugh much. Not even when the guys went wholesome at the end. (I did chuckle at Lynch’s wiener trick.)

Scott and Rudd are a good team. But they didn’t hit me the way Mac and Jackson did in Soul Men. Or Cohen and Cedric in Madagascar 2. And I‘m not saying that just because Obama was elected president.

Read Michael Wilmington's DVD Reviews of the Week: Transsiberia, Kung Fu Panda, Planet of the Apes, and The Red Balloon/White Mane -- plus, this week's box set picks ...

- Michael Wilmington
November 7, 2008

Recent Columns
10.30.08 - HIgh School Musical 3, What Just Happened? and Changeling (Review Pt 2)
10.23.08 - Changeling, Happy-Go-Lucky, Rachel Getting Married, I've Loved You So Long
10.16.08 - W., The Secret Life of Bees, Sex Drive, Filth and Wisdom,
10.10.08 - Body of Lies, Flash of Genius and The Express,
10.03.08 - Blindness, Beverly Hills Chihuahua, Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist
09.26.08 - Miracle at St. Anna, The Lucky Ones, Eagle Eye, Nights in Rodanthe

 

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